Painting space with threads by Sheila Hicks in the Centre Pompidou

[by Marion Rivolier in Paris]

Last week, I walk in front of the Centre Pompidou. I guess, through the windows, large round shapes white, yellow, orange and red. It seems soft and limp. We want to lie down there. I seem to have seen a work of the same type, at the Venice Biennale, perhaps, or at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. By painting it from the outside, I take the time to observe it. I like its air aspect despite its monumental aspect and the game of gradient of colors.

Inside the exhibition, it is different, denser, colorful, anchored in the ground.

Sheila Hicks is a painter, she paints with her fingers on canvases, fabrics, she sews them, she pierces them skin them. She braids them, she builds the space with threads, she sculpts it with bales of textile materials, wool, colors. She composes the space and makes it vibrate in colors, textures and lights.

At the Centre Pompidou, she presents a retrospective of her work: small formats framed as paintings, sculptures of threads and wool, sketchbooks and research and large sculptures in which we want to dive!

The direction of the thread is important. The wire takes the light differently depending on the direction, vertical or horizontal.

If you look at it from the front, it’s different than if you look at it while walking. The movement of the visitor brings to life the pattern, the color and the light

What is the form of the work? Is it definitive? The process is sometimes more important than the result.